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Slavoj Žižek has got an opinion on every subject from decaffeinated coffee to sex, from seagulls and swearing to the end of the world. He talks to Helen Brown.

Žižek dismisses those who dub him “The Elvis of Philosophy” with a brisk: “To the gulag! All of them!”. “It is too traumatic for me to see myself. Whenever I see such a thing, my reaction is to ask: 'Would a woman allow me to take her daughter to the cinema?’ My God! Of course not! I don’t want to deal with myself. I don’t want to exist. I just want to think.”

But whether he wanted to or not, Slavoj Žižek came into independent existence in March 1949, in the then-Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. His father was an economist and civil servant and his mother was an accountant.

“My life is straightforward,” he says. “Nothing happened. At 15, I wanted to be a movie director. But I saw some really good European films and I accepted that I couldn’t do that. Then, at 17, I decided to become a philosopher.”